1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to effect imparting apparatus which are capable of imparting effects, which can be hereinafter referred to solely as effects, such as delay or reverberation to signals input thereto.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, a so-called multi-effector which imparts any one of various effects such as distortion, chorus, delay, reverberation, etc., to a signal received from an electronic musical instrument or the like has been proposed and put to practical use.
Some conventional apparatus had a structure which imparted a single effect to an analog signal input to thereto, using an analog unit such as a BBD or a transistor. Along with a recently developed digital structure of a signal generator, the effect imparting apparatus has a structure which processes an input signal digitally to impart an effect to the input signal.
More recently, in order to provide a higher quality tone, it is desired to provide an imparting apparatus which is capable of imparting a plurality of different effects simultaneously to the input signal, imparting the same effect to, or performing different processes on, two input signals, or allowing the user to select any one of those processes freely.
In the conventional analog effect imparting apparatus, a plurality of units must be re-connected with prodigious labor in order to change the kind of the effect or the form of impartment of such effect.
Recently, the kinds of effects to be imparted have increased, and hence an effect imparting apparatus must be prepared for each of the kinds of the effects, which was virtually impractical.
In order to eliminate the above drawbacks, digital effect imparting apparatus have been developed. In those apparatus, various effects are stored beforehand as programs in a memory, a program corresponding to a selected effect is only required to be read out of the memory as required. Such apparatus is not so large-sized compared to the analog one.
Even with such digital effect imparting apparatus, however, as the kind of effects to be imparted increases as recently and the form of imparting selected effects is diversified; for example, how to impart selected effects to a plurality of input signals and how to output the respective signals with the imparted effects, an independent program must be provided for each of the various effects and the forms of effect impartment, which would greatly increase the quantity of programs to be stored. This would require a large capacity of memory, which would increase the cost and access time, undesirably.
Increases in the number of effects to be selected and forms of effect impartment would increase the number of operators (for example, switches) used to select an effect and/or the form of effect impartment.